My correspondent asked me to copy for her ten or a
dozen lines from a poem which I had written years before on the death of
a child. The request was so shrinkingly put, with such an appealing
air of doubt as to its being heeded, that I immediately transcribed the
entire poem, a matter of a hundred lines or so, and sent it to her. I am
unable to this day to decide whether I was wholly hurt or wholly amused
when, two months afterward, I stumbled over my manuscript, with a neat
price attached to it, in a second-hand bookshop."
Perhaps the most distressing feature of the whole business is the very
poor health which seems to prevail among autograph hunters. No other
class of persons in the community shows so large a percentage of
confirmed invalids. There certainly is some mysterious connection
between incipient spinal trouble and the collecting of autographs. Which
superinduces the other is a question for pathology. It is a fact that
one out of every eight applicants for a specimen of penmanship bases
his or her claim upon the possession of some vertebral disability which
leaves him or her incapable of doing anything but write to authors
for their autograph.
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